Latintos stands for "language transformations in texts and open sources." The LATINTOS BLOG highlights different spellings and different meanings of words, phrases and abbreviations as well as their origin. Latintos compares words in different contexts and different languages including scientific and formal languages. Further, name construction is analyzed and applications of systematic names and nomenclature systems are monitored.

Saturday, August 29, 2009

Tunas belong, along with mackerels and bonitos, to the Scombridae family. Members of this family make a lot of headlines as food fishes and as animals that face extinction due to overfishing. The shift from fishing to farming and breeding tuna may help to support tuna conservation efforts. With so much talk (and much less research, unfortunately) about tuna, it should not be any surprise, that some tuna (and one bonito) species come with three-letter acronyms:

ALB: albacore (Thunnus alalunga);

BET: bigeye tuna (Thunnus obesus);

BFT: bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus), alko known as northern bluefin;

SBT: southern bluefin tuna (Thunnus maccoyii), considered a subspecies of Thunnus thynnus by some ichthyologists;

SKJ: skipjack (Katsuwonus pelamis), also known as arctic bonito, oceanic bonito and as aku in Hawaiian;

YFT: yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares), named ahi in Hawaiian.

The blackfin tuna (Thunnus atlanticus) obviously did not make it into the three-letter-acronym league of tunacronyms. Maybe as blue-black back tuna (BBT) or golden-yellow-banded tuna (GBT or GYT) it has a better chance. Richard Ellis, in Chapter 9 with the title The Bluefin's Popular Little Cousins in his Tuna book [1], characterizes the blackfin, colorwise, as follows: “the blackfin is blue-black on the back, with a golden yellow band that runs from eye to tail but fades soon after death.”

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Europe is the name of a continent or, depending on your definition of the term continent, the name of a subcontinent of Eurasia.Europa is the name of one of the four Galilean moons of the planet Jupiter. The moon name Europa goes back to a suggestion made by German astronomer Johannes Kepler [1].In Greek mythology, Europa is the name of Agenor's daughter, who was beloved by Zeus, king of the gods. In Roman mythology, his name is Jove or Jupiter. The latter name was given to the planet. One of his satellites was later named Europa, after other suggested names, based on potential Medici and Brandenburgian patrons of astronomy, were rejected.

Note on corresponding adjectivesThe adjective European (as in European Space Agency, ESA) is used to refer to Europe. I haven't seen the adjective Europan (looks more like a misspelling of European) in use. Maybe Europar, like lunar, is a better choice? The most common form is Europa's (as in Europa's icy surface).Note on grammatical genderThe German language uses the name Europa for the moon, the continent, and the seductive goddess ruling behind all of it. The noun Europa is taken in the gender-neutral form (das Europa) for the continent and in the masculine gender (der Europa) for the moon (der Mond in German for the moon). The name of Jupiter's moon is derived from the Greek goddess Europa, for which the feminine gender applies: diegriechische Göttin Europa.

Reference[1] Andrew Lawler: Is This the Best Place to Find Life in the Solar System? • NASA is gambling $4 billion that something is stirring beneath the ice of Jupiter's bizarre moon Europa. Discover MagazineSeptember 2009, pp. 42-47.

Europa is, along with Ganymede, Io, and Callisto, one of the four Galilean satellites of the planet Jupiter in “our” solar system [1-3]. Europa's discovery is claimed by the two astronomers Galileo Galilei (note the term Galilean satellites) and Simon Marius, but the name for this Jupiter moon was suggested by a third astronomer, Johannes Kepler [4]:

Scientific competition and jockeying for political support are nothing new in astronomy; they are not even new when it comes to studying Jupiter and its satellites. Four hundred years ago, Galileo Galilei and German astronomer Simon Marius both claimed to have been the first to spot the planet's four large moons (Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, and Io). Galileo proposed naming the moons after his powerful patrons, the Medicis, in a bid to win favor and funding. Not to be outdone, Marius suggested they be called the Brandenburgian stars, after his patrons. Neither nomenclature caught on.Years later, at a fair in Regensburg, [at the Danube river in Bavaria,] Germany, Marius ran into the famed astronomer Johannes Kepler, who jokingly suggested the satellites instead be named after Jupiter's mythological “irregular loves”—three maidens and one youth who were seduced by the king of the gods. Eventually those names stuck (although Galileo, not Marius, does get credit for the discovery in today's textbooks, because he published first).

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Port Lincoln, a fishing village and prosperous community at the coast of South Australia, is known today for its tuna companies involved in off-shore farming of southern bluefin tuna (see chapter one in [1]). The name of this town (or still village?) is derived from the name of a county in the east of England, Lincolnshire [1]:

Port Lincoln is situated on one of the world's largest protected natural harbors, encompassing Boston Bay, which covers an area more than three times the size of Sydney Harbor. It was discovered by Matthew Flinders under his commission by the British Admiralty to chart Australia's unexplored coastline in the ship Investigator. Dropping anchor inBoston Bay in February 1802, Flinders named the spot Port Lincoln after his native Lincolnshire in England. Initially considered as the alternative site for the state capital of South Australia, Port Lincoln was rejected in favor of Adelaide because Lincoln lacked an adequate fresh water supply. [...] Now the home of Australia's largest commercial fishing fleet, Port Lincoln has a thriving tuna-farming industry, but also aquaculture farms for kingfish, abalone, mussels, oysters, and experimentally, sea horses and lobsters.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Short-tailed shearwaters (Puffins tenuirostris) are seabirds of the Procellariidae family. They feed on krill, squid and fish including sardines (called pilchards in Australia) which are used as baitfish and, in frozen form, to pamper young tuna in off-shore tuna farming pens. In Australia, theshort-tailed shearwaters are known as mutton birds, also written in one word as compositum muttonbird. Biologically, they are more interesting than linguistically [1]:

The short-tailed shearwaters (Puffins tenuirostris) make one of the longest migrations of any bird, flying annually from their nesting sites in the Aleutian Islands and Japan to South Australia, a round trip of twenty thousand miles. Known as muttonbirds here because the early settlers plucked them from their burrows and ate them when other food was scarce, they are, like many other seabirds, competent in the air, on land, and in the water. [...] Muttonbirds are not plunge-divers like the gulls and terns, but usually wait on the surface, like ducks, poking their heads underwater to spot a sinking baitfish. They will then dive to catch the fish; properly positioned, you can see them “flying” underwater in their pursuit. They usually resurface—looking perfectly dry because their feathers are waterproof—and sit on the surface like ducks, but occasionally they will do something that startingly emphasizes their mastery of multiple elements: from underwater swimming they break the surface and keep right on going, passing through the water/air interface and taking flight.

[...] the most famous Burgess Shale site, a tennis-court size rock exposure now called Walcott Quarry, where Walcott first found fossils [in the summer of 1909]. Over nine field seasons he collected 65,000 specimens, and the site has since been picked over by innumerable expeditions; [...]

In his book Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould refers to Walcott's work and puts Walcott's findings into current context of problems related to the scientific identification of fossils and their taxonomic groupings. Burgess-type fossils have now been discovered around the globe and the study of their similarities or dissimilarities generates new insights in evolutionary biology and on life during the Cambrian Period.

Reference[1] Siobhan Roberts: Evolution's Big Bang • A storied trove of fossils from Canada's Burgess Shale is yielding new clues to an explosion of life on earth. SmithsonianAugust 2009, Volume 40, Number 5, pp.15-17.

The Burgess Shale is a rich repository of well-preserved fossils from the Cambrian age. It is located in the Yoho National Park of British Columbia, Canada, and is named after Mount Burgess in the Canadian Rockies [1]. Fossil organisms, found there, are called Burgess specimens:

The Burgess Shale is Mecca for paleontologists. Charles Doolittle Walcott, the fourth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, discovered this rich fossil bed a century ago, in the summer of 1909, and named it for nearby Mount Burgess. [...] The exquisitely preserved Burgess specimens (most likely entombed by underwater mudslides) include the remnants of soft-bodied organisms, which are rare in the fossil record. The animals inhabitated the ocean floor 505 million year ago, near the end of the Cambrian Period.

Reference[1] Siobhan Roberts: Evolution's Big Bang • A storied trove of fossils from Canada's Burgess Shale is yielding new clues to an explosion of life on earth. SmithsonianAugust 2009, Volume 40, Number 5, pp.15-17.